Ethno-Zionism and Antisemitism: Oppressing Both Jews and Muslims Alike
Systemic Oppression and Propaganda
Since the mid‑20th century, the State of Israel has been widely accused by human rights organizations, scholars, and international observers of systematically neglecting and oppressing the native Palestinian population, primarily Muslims, but also Palestinian Christians and Druze. Critics argue that the state’s policies have evolved into a complex system of separation, dispossession, and demographic engineering, designed to maintain Jewish political dominance while fragmenting Palestinian society.
Structural Separation and Control
Multiple human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and B’Tselem, have described Israeli governance as a form of apartheid, citing policies that segregate populations based on ethnicity and nationality. These include:
Dual legal systems: Israeli settlers in the West Bank live under civilian law, while Palestinians live under military law.
Movement restrictions: Over 500 checkpoints, roadblocks, and the separation wall limit Palestinian mobility.
Permit regimes: Palestinians must obtain permits for travel, building, farming, and even family reunification.
Land confiscation: Vast areas of Palestinian land have been seized for settlements, military zones, or “state land.”
📚 Sources:
Amnesty International – Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/
Human Rights Watch – A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution
B’Tselem – A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea
https://www.btselem.org/publications/fulltext/202101_this_is_apartheid
These policies have created what many scholars describe as statelessness by design, where millions of Palestinians lack citizenship, voting rights, or meaningful legal protections.
Displacement and Property Confiscation
Since 1948, Palestinians have faced repeated waves of displacement, first during the Nakba, then during the 1967 war, and continuously through home demolitions, settlement expansion, and forced evictions. Critics argue that these practices constitute a long-term strategy of demographic replacement.
Mechanisms of dispossession include:
The Absentee Property Law (1950), which allowed the state to seize land from Palestinians displaced during the Nakba.
Settlement expansion, which now includes over 700,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Administrative demolitions, where Palestinian homes are destroyed for lacking permits that are nearly impossible to obtain.
Military orders that declare Palestinian farmland as “firing zones” or “state land.”
📚 Sources:
UN OCHA – Demolitions and Displacement
https://www.ochaopt.org/theme/demolition-and-displacement
Al Jazeera – Explainer: Israel’s Absentee Property Law
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/5/25/what-is-israels-absentee-property-law
Haaretz – How Israel Uses Bureaucracy to Take Palestinian Land
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2022-02-01/
Many scholars and legal experts argue that these practices meet the criteria for ethnic cleansing or even genocide, as defined by the UN Convention on Genocide, due to the systematic destruction of a people’s ability to live safely and autonomously on their land.
Propaganda, Narrative Control, and Manufactured Consent
Alongside physical and legal mechanisms of control, critics argue that Israel has developed a sophisticated propaganda infrastructure, often referred to as hasbara designed to shape global opinion, suppress criticism, and justify military actions.
This includes:
1. State-sponsored messaging campaigns
Israel invests heavily in public relations, digital surveillance, and coordinated messaging to frame its actions as defensive and necessary.
The Ministry of Strategic Affairs has funded online influence operations targeting activists and journalists.
Pro-Israel lobby groups coordinate messaging across media, political institutions, and social networks.
📚 Sources:
The Guardian – Israel’s secretive influence campaigns
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/26/israel-disinformation-campaigns
+972 Magazine – Inside Israel’s Hasbara Machine
https://www.972mag.com/hasbara-israel-propaganda/
2. Evangelical Christian Zionism
In the United States, evangelical Christian movements have become some of Israel’s most powerful ideological and financial supporters. Their backing is often rooted not in Jewish safety, but in apocalyptic theology that instrumentalizes Jewish people for end-times prophecy.
Evangelical organizations have been accused of:
Funding settlement expansion
Lobbying Congress for unconditional military aid
Producing misleading surveys claiming overwhelming American support for Israeli policies
Framing Palestinian resistance as terrorism while ignoring state violence
📚 Sources:
Haaretz – How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Most Powerful Allies
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2020-01-07/
The Intercept – Evangelical Influence on U.S. Policy Toward Israel
https://theintercept.com/2021/05/16/evangelicals-israel-palestine/
3. Manufacturing consent through media framing
Major Western media outlets have been criticized for:
Minimizing Palestinian casualties
Using passive voice to obscure Israeli responsibility
Prioritizing Israeli government sources
Erasing Palestinian voices and historical context
Scholars argue that this media environment creates a feedback loop where public opinion is shaped by selective information, which then justifies continued military support.
📚 Sources:
FAIR – How U.S. Media Erases Palestinian Suffering
Columbia Journalism Review – The Media’s Israel-Palestine Problem
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/israel-palestine-media.php
The Bigger Picture
Together, these systems, legal, military, bureaucratic, and informational, form what many analysts describe as a comprehensive regime of domination. The combination of physical control and narrative control ensures that:
Palestinians remain fragmented and stateless
International pressure is minimized
Military actions are framed as defensive
Critics are delegitimized as antisemitic
Evangelical and geopolitical interests reinforce the status quo
This is why many scholars, activists, and human rights organizations argue that the oppression of Palestinians is not incidental but systemic, maintained through both force and propaganda.
Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Contemporary Society
Antisemitism and Islamophobia have surged dramatically in recent years, often rising in parallel and sometimes even emerging from the same individuals or ideological networks. Scholars at Harvard note that both forms of hate have intensified since the escalation of violence in Israel–Palestine, with the Anti-Defamation League reporting a 337% increase in antisemitic incidents and CAIR documenting a 178% rise in Islamophobic complaints in the months following October 7. These spikes reveal how political crises can inflame pre-existing prejudices and create new opportunities for hate to spread.
Antisemitism Across the Political Spectrum
While antisemitism is often associated with far-right extremism, it has increasingly appeared in progressive spaces as well. Some activists, misguidedly or through misinformation, have blamed all Jewish people for the actions of the Israeli government. This conflation of Jewish identity with state policy is a classic form of antisemitism, one that scholars warn is resurfacing in new digital and activist ecosystems.
Research from Rice University emphasizes that antisemitism must be understood not only as a historical prejudice but as a modern racialized ideology that adapts to political contexts. This helps explain why even left-leaning movements can reproduce antisemitic narratives, often unintentionally, through memes, conspiracy theories, or rhetoric that collapses distinctions between Jewish people and Zionist political structures.
Local Impacts: The Quad Cities
In the Quad Cities, these global tensions have manifested in very real dangers. Jewish activists involved in social justice work have faced:
Smear campaigns
Doxxing
Death threats
Online harassment
Attempts to delegitimize their activism
This mirrors national trends, where Jewish individuals who oppose Zionism or support Palestinian rights are often targeted by both the far right and segments of the left. The Harvard Gazette notes that antisemitism and Islamophobia often “reside within the same person,” meaning individuals who harbor one prejudice frequently harbor the other. This creates a volatile environment where Jewish activists can be attacked from multiple ideological directions.
Islamophobia Within Jewish Communities
At the same time, Islamophobia persists within segments of the Jewish community,often fueled by fear, trauma, and decades of political messaging that frames Muslims as existential threats. This dynamic undermines attempts at solidarity, even when local mosques and Muslim organizations reach out in good faith.
Islamophobia, as scholars argue, is highly adaptable and globalized, spreading easily across cultures and political contexts. This helps explain why even communities that have historically faced persecution, such as Jews can internalize and reproduce anti-Muslim narratives.
Attempts at Solidarity and the Challenges of Infiltration
Local groups such as QCCP (Quad Cities Coalition for Palestine) have worked to challenge both antisemitism and Islamophobia simultaneously. Their approach reflects a growing movement that recognizes these prejudices as interconnected forms of racialized violence. Scholars describe this as the “entanglement” of antisemitism and Islamophobia two systems of hate that often reinforce each other.
QCCP has:
Called for an end to Zionism as a political ideology
Condemned antisemitism and Islamophobia equally
Built coalitions across religious and ethnic lines
Advocated for Palestinian human rights
Promoted community education and dialogue
However, like many grassroots justice movements, QCCP has faced infiltration, sabotage, and disruption by agitators seeking to sow division. These actors often exploit tensions between Jewish and Muslim communities, spreading misinformation or provoking conflict to fracture solidarity efforts. This phenomenon is well-documented in activist spaces, where bad-faith actors sometimes extremists; sometimes opportunists attempt to derail movements for liberation.
Why These Forms of Hate Rise Together
Scholars at Harvard emphasize that antisemitism and Islamophobia share structural similarities: both rely on conspiracy thinking, racialization, and narratives of civilizational threat. They also note that:
Both Jews and Muslims are framed as “outsiders” in Western societies.
Both are targeted during geopolitical crises.
Both are used as political scapegoats.
Both are weaponized by authoritarian and extremist movements.
Understanding these connections is essential for building genuine solidarity and resisting attempts to divide communities that should be natural allies in the fight against racism, colonialism, and state violence.
Harvard Magazine – How Does Hate Spread?
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2024/02/how-does-hate-spread
(Explores how antisemitism and Islamophobia circulate socially and digitally.)
Rice University – Entangled Others: Antisemitism and Islamophobia
https://entangledothers.rice.edu/
(A research initiative examining how antisemitism and Islamophobia reinforce one another.)
Harvard Gazette – What Do Anti-Jewish Hate and Anti-Muslim Hate Have in Common?
(A breakdown of the shared structures and psychology behind both forms of hate.)
JSTOR – Islamophobia and Antisemitism Are Different in Their Potential for Globalization
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jewisocistud.22.1.03
(Scholarly article comparing how each form of hate spreads globally.)
Note: JSTOR may require free registration or institutional access.
Center for Islamic and Hebrew Studies – Beyond Analogy: Rethinking Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia
https://www.ihcs.org/beyond-analogy-rethinking-antisemitism-and-islamophobia
(A theoretical exploration of how these systems of oppression intersect and diverge.)
